The Virgin is Veiled
On Why Christ
Must Return:
Unveiling the
Perils of Neuropic M/ Hysteries:
Crusades, Witch hunts and the White Man's Burden Revisited
A New Soteriology?
The New World Order
is more
than a play on semantics. It has its own deep
truth that invokes its peculiar rhetoric and that
needs something more than a flash of inspired
reflection to be systematically tackled and
exposed. It is on this account that we may begin
by making a virtue of conclusions through an
observation on the fluidity of boundaries and the
opaqueness of meaning. Mysteries can sometimes be
read into histories, just as history sometimes
has a way of turning into hystery. This happens
when a chronology of events gives way to a
psychopathy of reflexes. Nowhere is this
phenomenal regression more evident than in the
manner in which the psychology of the New Europe
is shaping under the impetus of its continental
political restructuring. Nothing perhaps can
better illustrate this morbid dynamic than the
mounting tensions played out in the sordid
backyard of resurrected pagan ethnicities,
threatened identities and national insecurities.
Ironically, it was the "return of the
veil" worn by Muslim women that triggered
this turn to hystery and unravelled a sequence
that would unmask the veneer of European civility
and expose the myth of a European Enlightenment.
.
The drama is played out
round the rediscovered visibility of the
Muslim woman in the modern world. Through her modest
attire she conveys a host of meanings that defy a
misperceived set of conditioned reflexes. Foremost,
she is seen by her prosecutors as bearer and
perpetrator of a community of righteousness and light
in a world where God-Consciousness is a violation of
the secular creed and an abrogation of the rights of
materialistic age of unbridled licentiousness,
indulgence and self-abandon. And even if the courts
of the high priests of modernity may have given her
temporary respite, the devil's advocates in the
abattoirs (slaughter-houses) of the Drina Valley in
Blighted Bosnia have canonized a highly professional
version of mass rape for an irrevocable verdict in
the field. It is between the crudities and the
sophistications of the one and the other, between the
courts and the battleground, between the venues of
proclaimed valour and high diplomacy and the back
alleys of stealth, intrigue, stench, and dross that
the balance and the fate of the soul of the new
Europe hangs.
Will the New Europe, "Neuropa",
succumb to the temptations of the neurosis of the
veil and once again fall victim to its worst
histories? Or, will the better part of a civilizing
impulse and a genuine adhesion to the gospel of love,
charity, and submission to the way of truth that
Christ preached prevail? It is not without
significance that for now, in its early phases at
least, it is in the guise of contrived and
misconceived religiosities that the ghosts of the
crusading kingdoms are being resurrected. Nor is it
without peril to the outcome of that balance to
overlook the conflicting tugs and pulls at the level
of European statecraft: a lukewarm politics of a
vaccillating conscience and morality offset by the
feverish stings of a Realpolitik feeding on a
lethally seductive brew of power and avarice.
I wake up to a twilight zone of
faded recollections. I find myself privy to an
ongoing debate and trial where the Defender of
the Peace ( Marsilio di Padua?) is making his
case before the Counsel of the Muses. Though the
Court is the Elyseum it seems to my flickering
consciousness to be perpetually hovering on the
brink of a precipice that winds its sinews into a
raucous avalanche of cascading recesses. Chunks
of frozen histories that remain to haunt and
taunt. The defense is inadvertently turned into a
prosecution. And as voices merge, the echoes
reverberate in staccato:
"The
Holocaust was a European
Invention of the 20th Century;
But so were the Pogroms before
it, the Burning at the Stake, and
the Great Inquisition. The Ethnic
Cleansing on the eve of the 21st
Century needs to be seen in this
venerable lineage.
Nationalism
is a European invention; but
so was racism, fascism, nazism
and communism. The humanism of
the Renaissance and the humanism
of the Enlightenment need to be
assessed against these other Isms
in the European sphere of
civilization.
Freedom, liberation, and emancipation
are a triple rendering of one and the same appellation which is part
and parcel of the secular trinity
in European modernity: … But
so is capitalism, imperialism,
colonialism and sexism. These
have constituted the landmark
dialectics of the chapter of
history bequeathed to humankind
by Europe under the name of
modernity.
The
Crusades and the Witch-hunts were
the legacy of a medieval European
Christendom that
was dubbed by European historians
as 'the Dark Ages'. The present demonization of the veil and the
phobia of Islamic fundamentalism
can only be a nostalgic return to
crusading witch-hunts of a dark
past by the heirs of
Enlightenment.
Modern
Technology is a European
invention !… But
so is Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
Chernobyl, the Gulf War, and the
Drought in the Sahara. Star Trek
Wars and Nuclear Waste have not
added to the measure of security
and prosperity of a stricken
humanity in the global village
that European ingenuity has
ushered in to speed up the end of
history."
According to Biblical justice, the
sins of the fathers are visited on the sons.
History is the greatest witness to the outcome of
nations' intents: to their proven deeds and
actions. The witness of history leaves little
doubt as to the enormity of the burden of guilt
that weighs down the blackened conscience of a
significant segment of humanity identified with
its European progeny: sons and daughters. For too
long victims of delusions of mastery and
election, only a feat of divine excruciation can
deliver them of evil. Perhaps in this sense, the
voices of the fundamentalist Christian revival
are prophetic. The Gospel of Love and Redemption
points to the imminence of the Second Coming of
Christ: the Messiah and Deliverer, if only to
bear witness against the inequities of those who
claim his name.
Enter the Virgin Mary.
The
scales that are on the eyes are
removed.
The Virgin is veiled.
In
veiling honor, shame is exposed.
The
curtain rises.
